The Great Beer Thread

[John in Covina]

These were all poured straight from the firkin through a tap on the end. Breather in the bung hole on the topside.

Gravity feed. This was used at the big festivals for it's simplicity and rapid change out. Without a CO2 system the beer would go bad fairly quickly from the air coming in so it was used when the kegs would not be stored for long.

 

[dnjan]

Some of the best beer I've had has been served that way. Including Kolsch in Cologne and Altbier in Dusseldorf.

The beers at BarVola in Toronto ranged from pale ales through porters and stouts, and included a couple of barleywines.

 

[majormajor]

Not much representation of English Beer here. So here's a little bit.

My local Pub, with nine traditional Real Ales, Real Ciders, and in the back bar, a huge array of Belgian draught and bottled beers.

Nice

 

[MikePotts]

I had a 'seasonal' Newcastle Ale today...'Werewolf', made at The Caledonian Brewery, Edinburgh. Surprisingly nice despite the name. 4.5 abv and less sweet than regular "Jawnie Inta Spayuce"

The local distributor brought one bottle(!) to the local saloon in hopes of enticing them to carry it on draught.

 

[majormajor]

Ah yes. Marketed as a "limited edition" in the UK, the website did say that Werewolf might go draught in "selected markets". I guess that meant Texas!

Branded "Newcastle", but brewed in Scotland - another ba***rd child of the ever advancing brewery mergers in the UK.

Started out (in 1749) as Youngers - merged with McEwans in 1931 to become Scottish Brewers - merged with Newcastle in 1960 to become Scottish & Newcastle - swallowed Courage in 1995 - taken over by Heineken/Carlsberg in 2008.

They also own Beamish, John Smiths, Websters, Fosters and Kronenberg, amongst a million other brands.

Products from conglomerates like this are generally avoided by good beer fans in the UK, although their draught Deuchars IPA has won a few plaudits of late.

 

[majormajor]

Without a CO2 system the beer would go bad fairly quickly from the air coming in so it was used when the kegs would not be stored for long.

Not true, I'm afraid.

All traditional beer in the UK is served WITHOUT C02. A wooden vent (spile) is knocked into the sealing hole of the cask, specifically to let air into it, in order that the beer can be dispensed.

The dispense method could be gravity, electric pump or handpump. As long as the beer is kept at the right temperature (NOT icy cold!! - 52 degrees F, 13 degrees C) and sold within the right time frame (around 3 days) it will NOT go bad due to air in the barrel.

Keg Beer is fed with C02 because the life has been pasteurised out of it - it is a flat, dead product - and it would taste like p*ss without some gas. And the reason it was turned into Keg Beer in the first place is so that completely unskilled, low-paid workers, who know nothing about looking after proper beer, can be employed to sell it.

 

[dnjan]

Keg Beer is fed with C02 because the life has been pasteurised out of it - it is a flat, dead product - and it would taste like p*ss without some gas. And the reason it was turned into Keg Beer in the first place is so that completely unskilled, low-paid workers, who know nothing about looking after proper beer, can be employed to sell it.

Not completely true either.
I've had the same beer (at the brewery) in both cask-conditioned (naturally-carbonated) and on CO2.
While I prefer the cask-conditioned version, the artifically-carbonated version allows greater flexibility at the brewery.
And better product control for pubs that may not sell enough of that particular beer to go through a cask-conditioned keg while it is still good (agree - three days if properly stored).
We have many pubs with 20-30 (or more) taps, and if they were all cask beer many of them would go bad due to "being on" too long.

 

[John in Covina]

In most systems the CO2 is used to push the beer to the tap and it creates a blanket on top to preserve the beer.
If cld & under a lot of pressure the beer will often gain in carbonation on a CO2 sytem if a keg doesn't sell very quickly.
The brews that have been opened to outside regular air will sour after a while so some places using gravity feed have a system where a low pressure inert gas is used to make only that preserving blanket on top to keep the brew from souring.

Pasteurization is used to extend the life of a beer, so that there are no living microbes to spoil it from within. Beer is supposed to be carbonated and the big brewers charge the beer to carbonate it. Beer is perishable, the light end ones will only last so long and be past there best by date quickly. Heavy / strong beers can often last a much longer time such as the Thomas Hardy Ales. Beer tends to need either a rigorously clean brewing area or extremely quick vigorous yeast. There remains some open vat brewing and the Belgians have those wild yeasts that come in out of the night air but most of the world's breweries are marvels of clean and have labs that would be the envy of Pasteur.

 

[majormajor]

In most systems the CO2 is used to push the beer to the tap and it creates a blanket on top to preserve the beer.
If cld & under a lot of pressure the beer will often gain in carbonation on a CO2 sytem if a keg doesn't sell very quickly.
The brews that have been opened to outside regular air will sour after a while so some places using gravity feed have a system where a low pressure inert gas is used to make only that preserving blanket on top to keep the brew from souring.

Pasteurization is used to extend the life of a beer, so that there are no living microbes to spoil it from within. Beer is supposed to be carbonated and the big brewers charge the beer to carbonate it. Beer is perishable, the light end ones will only last so long and be past there best by date quickly. Heavy / strong beers can often last a much longer time such as the Thomas Hardy Ales. Beer tends to need either a rigorously clean brewing area or extremely quick vigorous yeast. There remains some open vat brewing and the Belgians have those wild yeasts that come in out of the night air but most of the world's breweries are marvels of clean and have labs that would be the envy of Pasteur.

Come to Britain, my friend. I'll buy you a pint of proper beer.

Beer sold here from a C02 fed keg cannot be sold as traditional Ale. And we CAN tell the difference. And pubs that try the blanket pressure trick don't get away with it either. We CAN tell the difference.

Yes, you are right about pasteurisation - it extends the life of the product, so that idiots can kick the kegs around the cellar without any ill effects, and it can sit in a keg for weeks, and still get sold to some unsuspecting customer. But then the natural carbonation (from the yeast) has gone - hence C02 to put artificial gas back in.....
And the reason all that is done is because it means more profit for the (increasingly) conglomerate brewers. Cheaper labour and no ullage (wastage to you).

Real Ale is a living, breathing drink. It needs care and attention. It needs skill to look after it, and it needs selling (just like a loaf of bread) when it is fresh. The secondary fermentation that takes place in the cask creates carbonation WITHOUT C02. And believe me, breweries that brew traditional living ale with NO pasteurisation are JUST as spotlessly clean. And I'm not talking about some belgain open vat thing - I'm talking regular beer production WITHOUT the removal of all the good stuff at the end.

The UK brewing industry tried very hard, back in the 80's, to sell us on the "advantages" of dead beer. In the UK, we didn't buy it - the consumers rebelled, and now Real Ale thrives.

I guess the PR departments did a better job on you guys

 

[bulldog1935]

OK, but the craft breweries in the US are more exiting to us. Stone's Ruination IPA is nectar of the gods.

 

[dnjan]

As much as the PR departments is the demand for a large number of choices. There are many pubs with 20-30 taps or more. They just wouldn't sell out 20-30 cask-conditioned beers in time to keep them all fresh.
The issue is further complicated by the "bigger, more" plague that exists in the U.S., especially on the west coast. Beers with 6.5, 7 or even 8%ABV are fairly common. Most people just can't do 3 or 4 pints of those at one sitting.
The concept of a session beer is slowly re-emerging, mostly on the east coast. There it is possible to find one or two beers at or under 5%.
When people drink 4 pints in a sitting, it is easier to keep beer fresh.

So there is hope over here. But I fully agree that it is so much easier to find good, cask-conditioned beer in England.

 

[Dan Allen]

When the Scottish kayaker Douglas Wilcox was presented with Budweiser in a can , after figuring out how to get into it without a church key described it as a "strange beer like substance". Unfortunately that's mostly what is available here. I haven't had really good beer since I moved away from an old German couple that brewed their own "old country" beer, that only taste good at room temperature. Why are Americans obsessed with everything being ice cold?

 

[Dixon Cannon]

Rownd gyntaf yma! - Bro Buckley ≈

-dixon cannon

 

[John in Covina]

The was a story about the big comglomerate that owns Bud bought Becks and is trying to make it in Canada. Their sales dropped 14% Miller did the same to lowenbrau. Coors killed Killians Red. The major brewers deal in the lowest common denominator and anything with true flavor must be destroyed.

 

[anon`]

Highly filtered (clear) beers must be force-carbonated. Kegged beer is typically force-carbonated, as well. Keg systems rely on an external source of gas (usually carbon dioxide or a hand pump) to force the beer out. Said high-filtered beer is, quite literally, dead. Cask-, keg-, or bottle-conditioned beer is quite alive; the fermentable sugars are added and the remaining yeast in suspension cause the carbonation. Regardless of the method used to carbonate, beer exposed to oxygen will oxidize, which leads to soapy off-flavors. Three days is not long enough for such oxidation to occur.

Oh, and milk is pasteurized; beer is boiled. The end result is the same.

 

[majormajor]

double post - my apologies

 

[majormajor]

Highly filtered (clear) beers must be force-carbonated.

Exactly my point. All the good stuff that the "Craft Brewer" talks so lovingly of is filtered out. Then it's pasteurised so it will last for ever. And then fed with C02 so it will make you belch and fart. A real art form.

Oh, and milk is pasteurized; beer is boiled. The end result is the same.

Pasteurisation was developed by Louis Pasteur & Claude Bernard in 1862, as a method of stopping BEER & WINE from souring. Heating wine to achieve this had been done for centuries by the Chinese. Pasteur & Bernard added rapid cooling to the process. It was LATER applied to milk production

 

[dnjan]

This discussion must be careful to differentiate between ales and lagers. I have had "clear" lagered beer that was cask-conditioned (and then not filtered), and was excellent.

 

[anon`]

Exactly my point. All the good stuff that the "Craft Brewer" talks so lovingly of is filtered out. Then it's pasteurised so it will last for ever. And then fed with C02 so it will make you belch and fart. A real art form.

Pasteurisation was developed by Louis Pasteur & Claude Bernard in 1862, as a method of stopping BEER & WINE from souring. Heating wine to achieve this had been done for centuries by the Chinese. Pasteur & Bernard added rapid cooling to the process. It was LATER applied to milk production

I can copy and paste from Wikipedia, as well. But it should be pretty obvious that boiling achieves the same result as heating. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you've only ever been exposed to BMC beers, because there is no reason to pasteurize finished beer if you pay any kind of attention to basic sanitation. That's probably why the vast majority of American (and, I expect, European) brewers don't do it. And all of those breweries condition their bottled beers in the bottle.

Short form: craft breweries don't filter the hell out of their beer. AB InBev, SABMiller, and Molson Coors do.

As for lagers, they're clear because of good brewing technique, paired with how lager yeast behaves. There is no reason that you can't naturally condition a lager, even in a bottle.

 

[dnjan]

That's probably why the vast majority of American (and, I expect, European) brewers don't do it. And all of those breweries condition their bottled beers in the bottle.

Are you sure? - I believe most craft brewers (at least in the U.S.) bottle their beer already carbonated, rather than bottle conditioning. This improves product reliability (not necessarily product quality), and eliminates the need for the brewery to store large numbers of bottles under controlled conditions while they naturally carbonate in the bottle.
Sure, some special releases are bottle conditioned, but most are not.